Education is a major force for economic and social wellbeing. Despite high aspirations, education at all levels can be expensive and ine®ective. Three Grand Challenges are identi¯ed: (1) enable people to learn orders of magnitude more e®ectively, (2) enable people to learn at orders of magnitude less cost, and (3) demonstrate success by exem- plary interdisciplinary education in complex systems science. A ten year `man-on-the moon' project is proposed in which FuturICT's unique combination of Complexity, Social and Computing Sciences could pro- vide an urgently needed transdisciplinary language for making sense of educational systems. In close dialogue with educational theory and practice, and grounded in the emerging data science and learning ana- lytics paradigms, this will translate into practical tools (both analytical and computational) for researchers, practitioners and leaders; genera- tive principles for resilient educational ecosystems; and innovation for radically scalable, yet personalised, learner engagement and assessment. The proposed Education Accelerator will serve as a `wind tunnel' for testing these ideas in the context of real educational programmes, with an international virtual campus delivering complex systems education exploiting the new understanding of complex, social, computationally enhanced organisational structure developed within FuturICT